From seller's market to seller's market. In the early 1980s, the total number of lawyers was small, and many of them were directly transferred from the current staff of public security, procuratorate and court system, with a strong color of administrative management and regional management. So there were not many lawyers to choose from at that time. However, since 1986 began the lawyer qualification examination, and since the reform of the firm system began in the early 1990s, a large number of lawyers have flooded into the market to compete as equal service providers, providing sufficient choice space for the parties.
From information asymmetry to information disclosure. In the early 1980s, the parties often selected lawyers in a small internal scope through the network recommended by superiors, peers or insiders. Sometimes, lawyers often rely on information and introductions provided by intermediaries, plus their own qualifications and eloquence, they can undertake this business. But now many large-scale legal service projects are trying to gradually open the bidding system. The requirements of public service projects require the participating firms to provide detailed legal analysis and legal service suggestions for the service projects, and at the same time, the working mode, professional expertise and qualifications of the firms should be listed in detail for reference. This puts forward higher requirements for lawyers' practice level and the comprehensive strength of the firm, which objectively helps to promote the overall development of the firm.
From single relationship marketing to compound marketing. The power to choose a lawyer in the early stage is often concentrated in the hands of the high-level or competent leaders of the parties, lacking objective and transparent selection criteria and procedures. Therefore, many lawyers can use a single relationship marketing strategy and pay attention to the relationship with the main leaders of the parties to undertake business. But now the situation is very different, and the choice of lawyers for many major projects often requires collective discussion and final decision. In addition, in the selection criteria, the professional knowledge of the firm, the feasibility of legal solutions and even the quality of service are taken into account. Therefore, the changes in the market require lawyers not only to establish and consolidate social networks, but also to constantly improve their professional level and service quality.
From price competition to value competition. In the early days, the professional division of lawyers was not obvious, and the role of lawyers was not prominent. Therefore, the price difference has become the most decisive factor in the comparison between the parties. However, with the development of lawyers' professional division of labor and the continuous improvement of service quality, the parties have gradually changed from simply comparing prices to paying attention to meeting needs. Professional division of labor and service quality have become more concerned factors for the parties, which has also played a guiding role in the development direction of the firm.
From famous lawyers to team models. At that time, lawyers were the object of contention. However, when famous lawyers gradually paid less attention to the entrusted affairs of clients due to the limitation of firm energy and business model, clients began to pay attention to the effectiveness of legal services instead of blindly pursuing the fame of lawyers. Teamwork mode emphasizes the division of labor and cooperation between lawyers, and the professional expertise matches each other, which can better ensure the quality of service, so it is widely welcomed by the parties. 2. 1 rely on past experience as a guide to marketing planning.
Different from the formulation and implementation of legal services relying on experience accumulation, a successful marketing plan should be a combination of successful experience and scientific data analysis. However, some lawyers have long neglected the scientific research on marketing strategies and relied too much on the successful experience of themselves or their peers. "That's what I used to do" is a common saying of lawyers. It is very dangerous to carry out the marketing plan according to past experience. Because China's legal service market is a rapidly changing and growing market, economic hotspots and rules are also changing rapidly. Successful experience in the past is often the root of today's failure.
2.2 Over-reliance and trust in advertising and media.
Advertising used to be an indispensable means in marketing, but today, with the intensification of advertising offensive, consumers' attitude towards advertising has undergone fundamental changes. According to a report published by the American Advertising Federation in 2000, only 65,438+06% consumers think that TV and magazine advertisements can provide information, and less than 27% consumers think newspaper advertisements are useful. It can be seen that people's trust in advertising is seriously lower than before. The same will be true in China. Although the advertising industry is currently in a period of rapid growth, people are extremely tired and disgusted with the advertisements flying all over the sky. Facts tell us that advertising is only a part of marketing strategy, which can strengthen the market position of products and release information, but it cannot establish a professional image and leadership position for the firm.
2.3 Imitate your opponent's successful experience
There are many factors for an opponent's success, including his own characteristics and environmental reasons. For example, the rise of securities lawyers in the early 1990 s, in addition to lawyers themselves spending a lot of time on business research and familiarity, do everything possible to coordinate the relationship with the judicial administrative department, and get the securities lawyer's examination certificate is the premise. Now, it is the goal of the judicial department and the inevitable trend of the development of the legal service industry to cancel all kinds of industry access qualification examinations except the judicial qualification examination. If you stay in the pursuit of various access qualifications, you will eventually find yourself behind the reality. If you blindly imitate others without considering all the conditions, you can only walk behind others forever.
2.4 Only five or less decision-making matters are considered in marketing.
When making a marketing plan, only one or several decision-making factors are considered, such as personal relationship, marketing objectives, positioning, advertising planning, pricing standards, product and service specifications, etc. This will also lead to the failure of the marketing plan. For example, in order to improve the loyalty of customers, they are keen on all kinds of social interaction with customers in an attempt to obtain a stable source of business by establishing good personal relationships. The mistake of this method lies in forgetting that customers need professional services and a set of values that follow. Good interpersonal relationship can certainly gain customers' feelings, but it cannot affect the business decisions made by customers based on economic interests.
2.5 Market judgment depends on the judgment of a few key customers.
Some lawyers' overall judgment on the market often comes from the opinions and value judgments of a few big customers, and their judgment on the market may come from dinner conversation with customers or chatting while playing golf. Although this practice is representative to a certain extent, if we do not conduct a comprehensive investigation, statistics and analysis of the market, it is tantamount to the blind touching the elephant. There are many specific ways to understand the market, such as designing questionnaires, calling or visiting friends and existing customer groups, attending various industry conferences or subscribing to industry magazines. To enter and occupy the market, we must first be familiar with the market, which is a difficult rule to try.
2.6 One-sided emphasis on meeting the needs of the parties
According to the traditional marketing concept, some lawyers unilaterally emphasize meeting the needs of clients, regardless of cost, and achieve their goals for clients at all costs. In this way, it is not only easy to bring various practice risks to lawyers because of the use of informal means. Moreover, lawyers are often caught in a dilemma: because there are too many promises at the beginning, the expectations of the parties are too high. Once the requirements are not met, it is easy to make the parties dissatisfied. In fact, clients are not legal professionals, so they often report unrealistic fantasies and hopes about legal services. An excellent lawyer should not only learn how to use appropriate means to meet the needs of clients, but more importantly, learn to guide clients' unrealistic ideas and design a set of solutions with the best cost-benefit ratio.
2.7 There is no clear target market, marketing strategy and return target.
Although lawyers are professionals, they are often amateurs in marketing. Lawyers' knowledge of making marketing plans may only come from the accumulation of daily life experience, or from a few words in newspapers and magazines, or even from personal understanding of TV advertisements. Formulating and implementing the lawyer's marketing plan according to daily life experience often leads to the failure of marketing plan or short-term behaviorism and utilitarianism without clear target market, marketing strategy and return target. It is short-term behaviorism and utilitarianism of marketing plan to pay kickbacks and commissions to introducers according to a certain proportion of lawyer fees.
More scientifically, the marketing plan can't be a wish or an idea, but it must stipulate that specific actions should be taken for a specific market within a specific time, so as to obtain a specific market share or income. For example, for a real estate department, the plan to develop real estate business at least includes:
Looking for those real estate companies? For example: state-owned, collective, domestic or foreign, local or foreign;
How to contact these companies? Advertising, sending legal plans, academic seminars or government departments to introduce;
What marketing strategies can be adopted? Strengthen a lawyer from the assets department to the real estate department, hire specialized consultants outside, merge a group of lawyers specializing in real estate business, and so on;
What is the goal of regression? It is estimated that the amount of fees will increase or the percentage of market share will increase.
2.8 Only lawyers conduct marketing during the negotiation.
Some people think that marketing is only in the process of negotiation between lawyers and clients, and other employees are internal jobs and have nothing to do with marketing. This view is actually wrong. Of course, it is marketing for lawyers to negotiate with customers and introduce the situation of the firm, but paralegals should answer customers' calls as soon as possible, actively seek information for customers and report the progress of their work. This kind of timely and proactive service is actually marketing. Because this kind of service, which is not aimed at selling services, is actually telling customers clearly: how much the firm attaches to customers and its service level. Is the marketing goal of the firm to earn lawyers' fees or to help clients realize real value? A subtle practical action can sometimes move customers' hearts more than a hundred beautiful advertising words. 3. 1 Create a distinctive corporate culture
Corporate culture refers to the value orientation and concept formed in the long-term production and operation activities of enterprises, which is recognized and pursued by all members. It is an organic combination of strategic formulation, humanistic culture, behavioral norms and evaluation system. It first appeared in the early 1980s and was introduced into enterprise management by the United States, Japan and other countries. It takes enterprise management concept and enterprise spirit as the core, and embodies the sense of belonging, enthusiasm and creativity of enterprise employees. Because of its humanized and scientific characteristics, it has been widely used in the world and has become the fundamental guarantee for the success of many large enterprises.
The corporate culture of a firm generally consists of a series of descriptions such as corporate mission, business philosophy, corporate positioning, development strategy, long-term goals, core values, and logos, but the specific descriptions are different, such as:
The corporate culture view of Wanshiji Law Firm, the world-famous largest Australian law firm, is: "Establish and maintain good customer relations; Provide excellent customer service; Attract, motivate, develop and retain outstanding talents. "
For a long time, the lawyer industry has paid more attention to the differences between the lawyer industry and other industries, and between lawyer institutions and enterprises, but neglected its characteristics in quality control, team building, brand building, corporate culture and even market expansion, and failed to actively learn from the advanced concepts and management methods of other industries, resulting in common bad phenomena: emphasizing individuals and ignoring institutions; Pay more attention to immediate interests than long-term plans; Talk about personal heroes, not teamwork. Law firms with "manual workshop style" and "self-employed joint office style" abound and are very popular. In addition to the old system and the distribution system of law firm commission system, the lack of corporate culture is the main reason.
In recent years, more and more researchers have realized the importance of this problem. In Beijing and other places where the legal service market is relatively developed, the success of some leading law firms is due to their high-quality talent system and relatively developed legal market factors, but the deeper reason should be that these law firms all have their own unique corporate culture system, which makes them maintain uniform service quality and professional standards in the process of rapid development and lays a solid foundation for maintaining core competitiveness.
3.2 Highlight the differentiated features of products and services
How to make your products and services break through the competition and attract customers' attention? If specialty is the foundation, differentiation is the key. Customers will definitely choose products and services that can bring them the greatest value. The so-called greatest value is often the service with obvious differences and advantages compared with other competitors. For example: service difference, that is, highlighting the obvious difference between service varieties, service methods, quality and price and other competitors; Personnel differences, through employment and training means, use better human resources than competitors to gain a stronger competitive advantage; Image differences, by establishing their own unique brands to distinguish them from competitors, etc.
On the premise that clients have the same needs, every lawyer is doing the same job for clients and describing his products and services. The lawyer who finally succeeds in obtaining the client's entrustment must provide different products and services, which is the difference. In the differentiation strategies of many leading firms, the emphasis on team service system, active service mode and pragmatic legal solutions are the main contents.
3.3 Create tangible features of service quality
The invisibility of legal services has caused difficulties in customer evaluation and legal service quality. In order to make it easier and more intuitive for customers to evaluate legal services, we must make the quality of legal services tangible. There are many tangible methods, including: firm profile style, legal proposal, website content; Lawyers' oral expression ability, writing style and concern attitude towards clients' interests; Timeliness, timeliness and initiative of service; The mental outlook of employees and the time to reply to customer questions; Even the appearance of the office and so on.
3.4 Pursuing a deeper value orientation
Value orientation corresponds to three levels of marketing strategy, namely speculation, kitsch and belief. The most superficial value of value orientation is speculative marketing centered on "situational value", such as: "If someone falls into the water, sell him a lifebuoy", because the "situation" of falling into the water creates the "value" of lifebuoy; The intrinsic value of value orientation is "consumption preference", that is, selection preference, code of conduct and moral norms based on social universal evaluation, which is a marketing concept based on "kitsch"; The deepest concept of value orientation is "belief", that is, the ideal way to represent the ideal values, lifestyle and so on of consumer groups.
There is a serious "opportunism" in the current legal marketing strategy, that is, marketing activities are carried out with superficial "situational value" A typical example is that there are often many referees hovering at the gates of some courts. When someone needs to go in and out of the court because of a lawsuit, they immediately gather together to sell legal services, which is the same as a "life buoy". This kind of speculative marketing must face the variability of customer evaluation. When the customer's situation changes, the value of the required products will decrease rapidly. For example, for a hungry person, the first steamed bread is the most valuable, the second steamed bread is not so valuable, the third steamed bread is dispensable, and the fourth steamed bread may be given for nothing. If we want to treat lawyers as a career instead of speculation, we must strive to develop into the inner and deep concepts of value orientation, study and cultivate consumer preferences, and establish value beliefs.